


Walk in the Park

by belovedmuerto



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Schmoop, empath!John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 16:00:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1905066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belovedmuerto/pseuds/belovedmuerto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has vivid sense memories of John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walk in the Park

**Author's Note:**

> This is written as a gift for significanceofmoths over on tumblr. They won my "Nice Round Even Number of Followers Giveaway" a couple months back.
> 
> Luckily enough, I never specified a time-frame in which the fic would be written.
> 
> This deviates somewhat from your prompt, although I think I got the spirit of it. I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Thanks, as should be more often, to my beta Castiron. 
> 
> Timeline-wise, this takes place... somewhere. Definitely post John losing his empathy and getting it back. But probably before the fic I'm currently working on. (Which is, um. Hopefully going to gain many new words when I'm on vacation.)

Sherlock wakes from a nap he’d never intended to take in something of a fog. Everything feels soft and warm around him, and he sits up slowly, blinking against the late afternoon sunlight filtering into the flat, and briefly wonders what it is, before realising: lust. What he’s feeling is a distinct and consuming lust, simmering though his blood, just below the surface of his thoughts.

And where the hell is John?

It’s gorgeous outside, the kind of late spring day that means everyone wants to be outside, enjoying the weather, feeling unaccountably happy and far from likely to commit heinous and interesting crimes. It’s been like this all week, and London is rejoicing in it. Sherlock has had nothing to do. It’s hateful.

John is not immune to the joys of springtime that have infected everyone in the London Metro area. How can he be? He feels those joys acutely, with each person he passes in the street. Sherlock cannot keep him inside the flat twenty four hours a day, no matter how much he wants to sometimes (John smiles at him, when he feels like that, and sits closer.)

John had been restless all morning, and had finally stomped into the lounge just after what he refers to as “lunch time”, carrying a blanket and a sack, apparently of food. He’d been exasperated and frustrated, but not angry. He was too happy to be angry, even with Sherlock, even with Sherlock’s boredom and malaise and sulking.

“I’m going to the park, Sherlock.”

Sherlock glared at him from his position on the sofa, still in his pyjamas, contorted in uncomfortable ways, his arms crossed. Petulant. (He can admit it to himself. He was fed up with the lack of Work and feeling incredibly childish about it. He hadn’t let any of the things John had done to help actually help. He wanted his sulk.)

“Fine,” John adds. And he had stomped out again.

“You could come with me!” he had shouted from the foot of the stairs. If Mrs Hudson had been home, she would’ve been shushing him. Or encouraging him, if she’d seen how Sherlock was acting.

“Boring!” Sherlock had shouted back. 

It doesn’t feel all that boring now, though. 

Sherlock pulls himself off the sofa and floats down the hall to their room. He dresses slowly, enjoying the way the fabrics feel against his sensitised skin, trying to find things that will be comfortable and cool in the warm weather as well as, hopefully, enticing to John. 

His husband.

He still has a hard time believing that he and John are wed. Married. They’re married. Forever. Til death do they part. It’s both surreal and wondrous.

Sherlock leaves the flat still thinking about John, his John, and the fact they’re married. He lets the thought carry him down the sunny street and into the park, where he slows his pace to look around, trying to deduce without relying on their connection where John is.

It’s not hard. He just follows the snogging couples.

John is laid out like a feast on the blanket he’d brought with him, sunglasses covering his eyes (just as Sherlock’s are covered; he’s extremely photosensitive when it comes to sunlight), legs crossed at the ankle, and his arms crossed beneath his head. His arms are bare, and he’s taken his shoes and socks off, cuffed his jeans to expose his ankles.

Sherlock finds he wants to kiss John from the feet up. He has to stop and stare for a minute, and digest that. He feels that particular warmth in the pit of his stomach that John engenders: part lust, part love, part exasperation, all fascination.

“Stop staring, Sherlock,” John murmurs, jolting Sherlock out of his stupor.

John feels… amazing. It’s as though he soaked up all the sunlight, and all the little joys of London and springtime and happiness, and is radiating them outward again. If the snogging couples are any indication, that is exactly what he’s doing: radiating. Which is not surprising, because he’s aglow. Sherlock can practically see the warmth and light flowing from his every pore. 

“Usually you clear whatever corner of the park you’re camped out in, John,” Sherlock murmurs, and it isn’t an admonition. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sherlock admires John’s power. He’s proud of it, of what John can do, even if John is sometimes afraid of it.

“Hadn’t noticed,” John replies. He hasn’t opened his eyes, or moved a muscle, really. He is the picture of contentment. And low-level simmering lust. Sherlock can feel it in waves now. Delicious. He sits next to John.

“I passed four snogging couples on my way from the St Clarence Gate.” He’d entered off Baker Street and skirted around the Boating Lake.

John chuckles.

“I’m approximately 95% certain only two of them were couples before they happened across each other this afternoon,” Sherlock adds, eliciting another chuckle from John.

“Only 95%?”

“Well, I didn’t stop and stare, John.”

John grins up at him. He turns on his side and props his head on his hand, looking up at Sherlock through his sunglasses. “I’m glad you came out.”

“I was taking a lovely nap.”

“I know. You were dreaming about me.”

“Was I?”

“Unless you have sex dreams about other people--which I don’t want to know about.”

Sherlock smiles down at John, and then stretches out next to him. “I wasn’t aware I was dreaming. I just woke up in a haze of lustful thoughts about you.”

“Well, I might have helped with that.”

“You can probably still help with that.”

John turns onto his side and props his head on his hand, smiling gently at Sherlock. “Are you propositioning me?”

“Well, my husband’s wandered off for the afternoon to commune with nature or some other nonsense.”

John just grins at him. “It’s lovely outside, Sherlock. Aren’t you enjoying the sun?”

Sherlock snorts. “Do I look like I enjoy the sun?”

John is still smiling, reaches out with his free hand and brushes his fingers against Sherlock’s cheek. Then he settles back onto his back, hands tucked beneath his head.

Sherlock settles next to him, scooting closer so he can lay his head on John’s chest, where he can hear John’s steady heartbeat. He listens to John’s heart beating, and John puts his arm around Sherlock’s shoulders, just a light weight against his back that grounds him, draws him in.

Sherlock thinks. It’s what he’s good at. But for now, he thinks about the things that he doesn’t usually think about, or at least doesn’t usually admit to thinking about.

He has devoted more and more space in his mind to John, since they met, since John hooked them together, since they got closer, since they started having mental sex, since they started having physical sex, too. It’s as they’ve been saying, all this time, they’re stuck together. And Sherlock is infinitely glad of that. He’s happy to devote gigabytes of memory to John. Terabytes of it. He’ll delete everything he’s ever learned about anything other than crime to memories of John.

Perhaps he’ll even delete crime, eventually. He doesn’t know. 

It hasn’t come to that.

He’s kept every little detail of John that he’s been able to grasp and hold on to. All of it, and he’s not entirely sure John actually understands that.

Oh, John knows how he feels. Of course he does. How could he not? After all, John _is_ an empath. Sherlock has learned far more about emotion than he’d ever wanted to know because of John’s empathy, because John had saved him after the incident at the pool and kept him safe.

He doesn’t know how to tell John that, though. How John has given him everything without holding anything back. He doesn’t know what he ever did to deserve that, or that he’ll ever be able to deserve it, but John gives it, and happily, and Sherlock will love him with every fibre of his being, with every breath in his body, until his heart and his mind finally stop.

And right now, they’re stretched out together in a park in the most wondrous city on earth on a gorgeous spring afternoon and Sherlock could not possibly be happier if there had been a locked room triple homicide with only two clues that completely contradict each other. 

He just doesn’t know how to express it.

They’re better at expression than they used to be. They are both learning to use their words. It’s got better, since John regained his empathy, though he’s more sensitive than ever. It’s a wonder his trip to the park this afternoon hadn’t soured John on people for a week. It must be the general mood that these first fine spring days bring out in people. 

“What were you dreaming about?” John asks. Murmurs, really, against his head.

Sherlock almost snorts again, because it’s a leading question if there ever was one. But it helps. John always helps, he makes things easier on Sherlock. And he would know, that Sherlock wants to get something out, wants to say something, needs to show John in some way, something that he’s feeling. 

So Sherlock does. He moves his arm, the one that had been draped across John’s waist, up so that his fingers can brush against the skin of John’s neck. Skin to skin contact always makes their connection stronger, makes it snap and hum deliciously. It makes it easier for him to draw up images and thoughts and words and let John absorb them-- or at least the emotional resonance of them. It makes it easier.

John mirrors him, moving his arm from around Sherlock’s shoulders so that his fingers are in his hair. 

Both of them make small sighs, as the thrill of that physical contact runs through them. Sherlock feels it like a shiver down his spine. John probably feels it like butterflies in his stomach, at least, that’s how he’s described it before.

Sherlock starts slowly, feeding imagery to John. He takes a simple, wholesome memory and gives it to John. A hug. Just a hug, comfortable and comforting and warm. He conjures memories of John’s smell, just there at the junction of neck and shoulder, where Sherlock always wants to stick his nose and simply inhale. John smells the way John smells; Sherlock has long since given up trying to categorize it. His nose is good, but not that good. John simply smells of himself. It is one of the myriad mysteries of John.

He can feel John smiling against his head, and he plucks up another memory of John. This one is more tactile. The feeling of John’s fingers in his hair. John loves his hair, and Sherlock loves having his hair toyed with. He likes the way John strokes his fingers through his hair, and Sherlock has a million memories of John doing so. 

He has so many memories of John, sensations and images and John’s jumpers and his hair and his laugh and the way his eyes crinkle when he’s happy, and the furrow in his brow when he’s not, and the way he cares, so achingly much, about people but especially about Sherlock.

Sherlock doesn’t know how to tell John all of this, he doesn’t know how to make John understand that Sherlock will never be quite right without him, was never quite right before him, and cannot imagine any viable alternative to having John at his side for the rest of his life.

But, as always, John just seems to _know_ , somehow, wonderful man that he is. His fingers move through Sherlock’s hair as he accepts the sense memories that Sherlock keeps feeding him, one after another, everything Sherlock has ever saved about John tumbling through his head while Sherlock’s heart pounds against his chest, and his breaths come faster and shallower, frustrated and imploring.

Sherlock forces himself to stop, after a time, when John’s fingers are tight in his hair and his chest is heaving with each breath. Because he could go on with this for hours, feeding remembered pleasure and sensation into John, filling him with it until neither of them can feel anything else but that pleasure, remembered and current mingling and swirling back and forth between them.

They’re both quiet for a time, lying in the sunlight on a blanket in the park, looking for all the world like a snoozing couple enjoying the rare fine weather. There’s no need for words here, no room for them amidst the sensations, amidst the pleasure.

John clears his throat, eventually, and Sherlock shifts to let him know that he’s listening.

“How long?”

“Hmm?”

“Since you stopped deleting things about me? How long has it been?”

Sherlock lifts his head and looks at John, who is looking at him with dawning wonder in his eyes.

“I’ve never deleted anything about you, John.”

“Never?” John sounds just a little incredulous, as though he thinks Sherlock must be joking.

But he can feel the way Sherlock feels, he must be able to feel that Sherlock isn’t joking at all, is deadly serious about this. He’s never deleted anything about John, and he has no intention of starting anytime soon.

Crime and John. John and crime. The two most important things in Sherlock’s life.

“Never,” Sherlock confirms, though he hates to repeat himself. 

“Oh,” John says, a bit stupidly.

Sherlock settles his head back on John’s chest, listens as his heart rate picks up, in surprise, in arousal, in sheer joy, or perhaps all three. He feels John’s fingers move in his hair, stroking down the back of his neck and down his back, then back up again.

“ _Oh_ ,” John repeats, his voice a whisper of awe.

Sherlock smiles a little against John’s chest.


End file.
